


Her Throne

by sunaddicted



Series: 007 Games Fics 2k20 [6]
Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: Awesome Eve Moneypenny, Character Study, Eve Moneypenny is M, Evolution, Gen, Growth, Personal Growth, Racism - mentions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-06
Updated: 2020-07-06
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:48:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24951847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunaddicted/pseuds/sunaddicted
Summary: Eve wasn’t really sure about when the idea of her career path ending up as M had crystallized into her mind; she only knew that after the debacle in Istanbul, her training failing her as her perfectly polished unfeeling and smarmy exterior had crumbled at the sight of a fellow agent falling to his death because of her, she had needed something more - something different.
Relationships: Eve Moneypenny & Q, M | Gareth Mallory & Eve Moneypenny
Series: 007 Games Fics 2k20 [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1794529
Comments: 10
Kudos: 18
Collections: 007 Fest Fancreations





	Her Throne

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt 105 from the Anonymous Prompt Excange (2017): Something showing Eve's transformation into the post-Mallory M
> 
> An immense thank you to Anyawen for the sensitivity reading and the tips! (I didn't manage to change the pov of the last part because life rip)

_Her Throne_

Eve wasn’t really sure about when the idea of her career path ending up as M had crystallized into her mind; she only knew that after the debacle in Istanbul, her training failing her as her perfectly polished unfeeling and smarmy exterior had crumbled at the sight of a fellow agent falling to his death because of _her_ , she had needed something more - something different. It had been a hard and laboured realization, it had taken her far longer than she liked to remember to admit to herself that the field job she had relentlessly trained for, for such a long time, it actually wasn’t cut for her; it hurt and it made her doubt herself, pushing her at the bottom of a whiskey glass night after night as she questioned what her talents and skills could land her now while she waited for MI6 to ditch her, stomach knotted tightly by dread and that particular brand of anxiety that one usually felt when the future suddenly was smudged by uncertainty, its crystal clear tracts and strokes erased into blurriness.

However, the nights passed and Eve got sick of tasting whiskey so she moved on to bourbon; the number of times she poured herself a glass diminished; the knotty mess that her insides had become loosened - much to her shame, the passing without event of James Bond’s barebone commemorative ceremony (it was so very hard to mourn for an empty casket, when only velvet would be there to catch the tears) helped too: it was as if the accident was fully archived, the reddish and freshly turned earth swallowing up the gleaming and polished wood more cathartic than Eve could ever imagine it being.

The nights passed and MI6 didn’t give her the boot. Eve didn’t quite know why she was so surprised: in the end, she had just been following a direct order from M; it wasn’t like she could have disobeyed her and kept her job, insubordination wouldn’t look nice on her freshly minted curriculum - it was the kind of attitude she was pretty sure that Olivia Mansfield accepted only from seasoned Double-Ohs who had more deaths under their belts than Eve could even imagine.

It was puzzling to think back on how badly she had wanted that career, now that she had been trained to be someone else - _something_ else, a different but just as lethal kind of weapon. 

_Take the bloody shot._

Years and a resurrection later, the words still rang between her ears in the midst of the worst of her nightmares, leaving her unsettled and angry at herself for still being so hurt - so broken. Maybe things would have been better if she had stuck out with the counselling that Psych had vividly recommended her to go through but back then she hadn’t wanted to wade into the depths of her trauma; Eve had wanted to move on, she had wanted for the air to stop feeling so still and stagnant in her lungs and going over what had happened and what feelings it sparked in her again and again only made her feel stuck and trapped by something she hadn’t had any control over.

Trapped by something she wish she had had control over.

Maybe realizing that need for control deeply rooted in the marrow of her bones had been the first, light push that had gotten the dominoes falling in the right direction and M had seen it too, where her helplessness and rage stemmed from - it was the only reason that explained why she would offer a virtual nobody (a green agent whose position on the feeding peg was relatively low in the big scheme of things) her to train to eventually take her place one day, to sit behind that very same desk from where the order that had shattered her career path as an agent had come from. Perhaps Eve read too much into the offer and most she definitely painted a more empathetic picture of Olivia Mansfield than what was true but, in a way, it had seemed to her the most honest apology the woman had been able to give her.

Eve still wasn’t sure about the woman’s reasons - not even after her death: she had stayed enigmatic until the very end and her corpse had been just as unreadable as her body when she had been alive, making her wonder if anyone actually knew the woman who had held the reins of MI6 for over a decade, never wavering in the hurricanes that had come and frequently at that. She felt so many contrasting emotions towards the woman but respect reigned supreme over them all, even if her death hadn’t hit her as hard as she imagined it would - or maybe she had just grown desensitized to seeing comrades fall, the sight of the Union Jack lovingly draped over caskets that always looked the same had become so familiar that it had stopped haunting her when she entered the oniric world; it was a slightly depressing thought but she couldn’t deny that it was… well, good.

While Eve wanted to be a different - she didn’t think she would be necessarily better - M than Olivia Mansfield had been, she knew that she couldn’t afford every loss to impact her as much as shooting James had shook her so many years before: it just wouldn’t be beneficial to anyone who would turn to her for strength and direction in the middle of the tempest, only degenerating into chaos, breeding more deaths.

No, she had to be strong.

And not because she was a black woman in a position of power, forced to fit the mold that racist stereotypes had cast for thousands of women like her, who just wanted to be someone without having to square up and show their worth every other minute for fear that what they had worked for so hard would suddenly be yanked out from beneath them - no: she had to be strong just like anybody else wearing the title of M would have to be because in a highly stressful and dangerously unpredictable line of work such as theirs, the leader couldn’t afford to be anything else but cold tempered and in control. Which didn’t mean being some kind of robotic machine disconnected from her emotions - that she was expected not to feel at all; it just meant drawing from her field agent training and compartmentalising things into neat little boxes that she would unpack whenever she had the chance to do so, without endangering the lives of those who counted on her with a lack of focus on the matters at hand.

Still, it seemed it wasn’t her moment yet.

Eve walked into the new M’s office with a mix of dread, relief and annoyance roiling thick in her stomach like oil slick coating the frothing peaks of the ocean, wondering about whether it had been explained to Gareth Mallory that she was way more than some kind of glorified PA and handy bodyguard whenever the situation called for it or whether she would have to explain it to him herself, already grimacing at the thought of how he could react at the knowledge that training her actually was part of his job description - afterall, he hadn’t been the one to set up the training: it was entirely possible that he would dislike the idea despite the fact that it had been approved by the upper echelons.

She knocked briefly against the door before entering, her posture straightened into a no nonsense attitude that she wore like an armour “Good afternoon, sir” Eve had to loudly remind to herself not to look around too obviously, she could always observe the changes Mallory had implemented to the office when the man was out for lunch or whisked away by a call of nature - still, it was kind of inevitable to notice how the sleek, modern features that Olivia Mansfield had preferred were no more, substituted by the kind of aesthetic she associated with centuries old colleges drowning in the countryside that would have never admitted her into their dusty grandiose halls just based on the colour of her skin.

"Miss Moneypenny, I presume?"

At least he knew her name, that seemed to be a good starting point - it either meant that someone had talked to him about her or that he had had the decency to go through the personnel files and had memorised already the names of those who would be working in contact with him "Yes, sir" she confirmed, stretching a hand between them "It's a pleasure to meet you"

"Likewise. I have heard great things about you and I'm looking forward to working with you"

How nice - _too nice_. Still Eve smiled, polite within an inch of her life; she supposed that was training as well, prepping her for when she would have to rub shoulders with snooty politicians and high-ranking officials who didn't even know what being out in the field meant; who had never held a gun in their hands with the intent of pointing it as someone to murder them; who woke up every morning in their pristine beds, smelling of laundry detergent and who didn't know what sleeping huddled in some corner, waiting for the right moment meant "I hope to learn plenty from you" there, if he knew he wouldn't ask further and if he didn't, at least she had put the topic out there.

"It's more likely that we will be learning from each other: I have a feeling that you know way more than I do about this job, you've been training for it for far longer than I have" 

Yes, she had but still she squashed down on the frisson of annoyance that those words evoked in her; it made her angry to know that someone who wasn't as trained as she was for the position was sitting behind what it was supposed to be her desk - oh, she knew that he was qualified to be M: the former Chairman of the Security Committee and lieutenant colonel of the British Army certainly knew plenty about what the country needed in terms of security and he also knew very well what it meant working in conditions akin to war zones. It just was very _suspicious_ that he had been picked over her, who had been training under Mansfield for years now; who was perfectly embedded in the work environment; who knew every single agents’ weaknesses and skills.

Eve Moneypenny who would have made for a rather seamless transition, diminishing the possibilities of insubordination - especially from the Double-Ohs who didn’t adapt well to being ordered around by someone new, unless they proved themselves to them; it sounded stupid and in any other workplace it would have looked absolutely mental but MI6 was different, it had its own unofficial dynamics that kept the whole circus balanced on a tightrope and if someone as high-ranking as M couldn’t keep up, the only thing in the agency’s future would be a ruinous fall.

Not that she would ever let it happen: Eve would make sure that when Mallory eventually left the post, hoping that the man would actually step back when he hit retirement age instead of dragging his feet and waiting to be killed in action or die in his bed, she actually would have an agency to control - she wasn’t letting the new M destroy everything she had worked for, her _second_ chance “I will be happy to help”

That afternoon, as she had sat down at the other end of the desk to show her new boss what exactly he needed to catch up as fast as possible, Eve hadn’t imagined she would come to respect and appreciate the man as much as she did; Mallory was easy to work with and he wasn’t afraid of turning to her for advice - _actually listening and heeding to it_ \- and letting her take on any project, call and meeting that she showed an interest in while unpretentiously regaling her with whatever knowledge he thought she might find useful. What she had thought of a waste of time, a delaying of her moment to shine, actually turned out to be a learning experience as M taught her what Olivia Mansfield hadn’t been particularly good at: schmoozing with the upper echelons; just the thought had been enough to make her shudder in annoyance and disgust but getting to the meetings with M, observing him work the room assertively and charmingly, employing techniques that she had been taught in her training as a field agent, it made her see those functions as something more approachable - even fun, if she was completely honest with herself.

It was a skillset Eve had never particularly thought she would get to sharpen but there she was, walking in and out of meetings with an ever growing web of connections finally webbing amidst her fingers, well aware of how that was going to make her job much easier when the time came.

Sooner than she had dared to hope.

“If you let the office organise a retirement party for me, I _will_ find the way to make your life a living hell even from the countryside”

“What?”

“Retirement party, Miss Moneypenny - a categorical no”

Eve blinked, momentarily stunned by the information her brain was processing straight from the man’s words “Already?”

Mallory raised an eyebrow in a mix of curiosity and perplexity “I am not exactly a young man anymore and I would actually like to enjoy what’s left of my life, rather than spend it working until my dying day” he didn’t need to add the name of who exactly he didn’t want to end up like, it wasn’t as if Moneypenny hadn’t been there on the comms like everyone else when Bond had announced his predecessor’s death - there was absolutely no need to twist the knife in a wound he hoped had healed “So, yes. Already”

“Who is going to take your place?”

“You”

Eve could hear the _obviously_ bounce around in her skull, like some kind of sound reverberating between walls - an endless echo that grew stronger instead of fading out into thin air “I.. me? Are you sure?”

“It should have been you already for quite a while”

True, she had always known that, but it just felt _good_ to hear Mallory acknowledge that “Yes but what is going to ensure my promotion won't be... delayed again?”

“Me” Mallory reached out and patted the back of her hand; physical comfort had never been exactly his strong suit but he made an effort for the young, extremely talented woman sitting in front of him, her eyes shining with both hope and fear - he wanted to say he knew how she felt but the truth was that he couldn’t, there were fundamental differences in the way society had respectively treated them that it made it impossible for him to truly understand where the mix of emotions swimming in her irises came from. The only thing he could respectfully do was to acknowledge those feelings “I will make sure everything goes as it should this time, I promise”

* * *

“You look damn great”

Eve grinned up at Q, leaning back against the chair she had worked so hard for; she had kept Mallory’s, the supple leather and the comfortable worn-in seat far too seductive to give up “It feels damn great” she wasn’t going to hide it, especially not to Q who had listen to her bouts of hopelessness over the years, his cardigan-clad shoulder always there for her to lean on when she needed support or somewhere to just cry over until she felt drained by whatever negative emotion had filled her up to the brim.

“Ready to get to work, M?”

“Yes, Q, I am” 

_Finally_.


End file.
